The game gets a slightly lower score due to the frequently sluggish frame rate and certain technical issues that can be observed during gameplay. A few times one of my teammates got stuck while he was passing through a nearby wall (!?!). Hm, must be an all-new-special-ops cloaking maneuver I'm not familiar with. In all, there are 16 missions in the single-player campaign, which, from my experience, should provide for some decent entertainment. Once you're done with that, you can have plenty of fun with the game's online and LAN multiplayer modes. I'm still not happy with some of the technical mishaps I ran into and I thought I wouldn't have any trouble running the game on my rig - AMD 64 3000+, GeForce 6800 and 1 GB of RAM (but I was obviously wrong there). Toning down certain effects improved the framerate, but it made the game considerably uglier.

Lockdown is certainly a well-polished game, and even though it shares a name with games released earlier on console, the developers at Ubi have done a great job at ensuring the game truly looks and feels like a PC shooter. With dozens upon dozens of terrorists inhabiting each level, the game still feels like a departure from older PC games in the series. But if you enjoy the modern counterterrorist theme, you'll still have a lot of fun playing Lockdown.

This newest addition to the Rainbow Six series could not win me over. Lockdown disappoints in too many areas. Once again Clancy offends the fans by associating his name with a game of lesser quality. If you're looking for an arcade shooter with cleanly cut graphics, Rainbow Six: Lockdown may be the right game for you, but those of you looking for a realistic shooter where strategic insights are necessary to win, you might want to walk straight past this one if you see it laying in stores.

In retrospect, it's hard to believe that the original Rainbow Six would start a cottage industry of Tom Clancy games, most of them quite good. Yet when RS took a long vacation in console land, it appeared to bring some bad habits back with it. It looks a heck of a lot better than your usual port, with a long list of fancy buzzwords and support for bunches of different resolutions, but it looks and feels like the heart of Rainbow Six is still sunning itself on a beach in Jamaica. I don't know who these guys are, and at the end of the day, I'm still not quite sure, since the mission progression of the console version has been inexplicably scrambled, thereby tossing into the air what story Rainbow Six Lockdown originally contained. It has something to do with terrorists doing naughty things, but the rest of it looks scribbled on the back of an envelope.

It's truly saddening to see the Rainbow Six series plummet to these depths. As it is, unless the next installment is a return to the series' glorious past, Lockdown will be the last Rainbow Six game I ever play. I cherish the memories of playing the earlier games too much to let them be soiled like this.

Change often represents a good thing, and plenty of games get knocked for sticking to the same formula in sequel after sequel, but the changes to Rainbow Six mystify us. Lockdown got rid of everything that made its predecessors stand out and kept the bad A.I. and even worse backstories. Even without the burden of living up to its predecessors, Lockdown is -- at best -- a generic shooter with pretensions at realism. If you really need to down some tangos, you're far better off hunting for previous Rainbow Six games in the bargain bin.

Previous Rainbow Six games received multiple patches to enhance their longevity and shape the product to the whims of the community, but, already, It seems that Lockdown may be cut short to make way for Its successor. Fan reaction Is nowhere near as supportive as that for Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear or other previous games In the franchise, and a lot of this seems due to Lockdown’s console roots. The patch may well come soon—but for PC Clancy fans, It will more than likely be too little, too late.

Change often represents a good thing, and plenty of games get knocked for sticking to the same formula in sequel after sequel, but the changes to Rainbow Six mystify us. Lockdown got rid of everything that made its predecessors stand out and kept the bad Al, and even worse backstories. Even without the burden of living up to its predecessors, Lockdown is—at best—a generic shooter with pretensions of realism. If you really need to down some tangos, you’re far better oft hunting for previous Rainbow Six games in the bargain bin.